The goal of ESG Lab reports is to educate IT professionals about data center technology products for companies of all types and sizes.
ESG Lab reports are not meant to replace the evaluation process that should be conducted before making purchasing decisions, but rather to provide insight into these emerging technologies. Our objective is to go over some of the more valuable feature/functions of products, show how they can be used to solve real customer problems and identify any areas needing improvement.
ESG Lab's expert third party perspective is based on our own hands on testing as well as on interviews with customers who use these products in production environments.

Want to know how you can accelerate multicloud IT with hyperconverged infrastructure?
Then download this video today and hear from a Cisco Consulting Systems Engineer as he gives an expert talk on Hyperconvergence and Multicloud and what strategies can be adopted by your company.
We also hear a case study from Avit Group on how they have successfully adopted Cisco solutions to power their business.
Download today to hear more!

With the rapid rise of hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI), many different solutions have emerged with varying levels of features and innovation.
As an IT decision-maker, you have to evaluate what HCI solution makes sense for your organisation. In this whitepaper, we make that process easier by outlining the three vital requirements you must have now in order to maximise the value of your HCI. With a little help, your next HCI investment will increase agility, reduce complexity and support your next generation IT environment.
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Hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) is the best strategic option for meeting your organization’s demands for increased efficiency and agility while leveraging existing apps and data. HCI is a scale-out software-defined infrastructure that converges core data services on flash-accelerated, industry standard servers, delivering flexible and powerful building blocks under unified management.
Put simply, HCI has the potential to revolutionise your security environment and increase efficiencies relating to application performance.
In this whitepaper, we break down the top 5 reasons why hyperconverged infrastructure is the right way forward for your organisation.
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Hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) is giving organizations the agility to respond quickly to demand for new products, services and applications. Many organisations begin their HCI journey by targeting specific use cases such as virtual desktop infrastructure, disaster recovery and remote office-branch office environments. But HCI continues to evolve far beyond these use cases.
In this case study, we look at real world deployments to identify how HCI is helping businesses to reduce TCO, improve scalability and rapidly adopt new technologies.
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VMware is once again positioned as a Leader in the Gartner Magic Quadrant for Hyperconverged Infrastructure. In the latest Magic Quadrant, Gartner acknowledges hyperconverged infrastructure is moving from compute and storage to a "full-stack." VMware believes it has the most trusted stack incorporating all major data center functions to deliver a single, ubiquitous control plane, agnostic of hardware.
Download the report today to learn more about the hyperconverged infrastructure landscape and VMware's leading solution.

You need to be ready to host any application anywhere. Our solution adapts to support all of your applications with the simplicity of hyperconvergence. If your IT organization is like most, you are stretched thin to support your developers as they create multicloud-native applications that they deploy across public and private clouds. And you still need to support line-of-business managers with traditional applications as they use both monolithic and cloud deployment models.
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Hyperconverged infrastructure solutions are making substantial inroads into a broader set of use cases and deployment options, but limitations exist. I&O leaders should view HCI solutions as tools in the toolbox, rather than panaceas for all IT infrastructure problems.
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Hyperconvergence is a hot topic right now. And for good reason. Organisations have longed for a way to reduce the amount of time and effort it takes to deploy new business-facing IT services. Hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) delivers the speed, simplicity and agility needed in today’s digital economy. But not all HCI solutions are created equal. And HCI is not the answer for every application or workload. In the following, we explore what makes HCI different from traditional IT infrastructure and how your business can benefit from the new capabilities it brings.

Most IT professionals today recognize that enterprise IT will be hybrid in the future. To provide the optimal foundation for each workload being deployed, the hybrid IT environment will include cloud-based infrastructures—from multiple providers—co-existing alongside infrastructure within the enterprise data center or a hosted environment.
But not all hyperconverged solutions yield the same results. The right hyperconverged infrastructure can meet your IT needs both today and well into the future. In this paper, we will talk about where your data center needs to be in the next five years to meet changing business demands, and how the roles of IT professionals will evolve. We will also review “hyperconvergence” models, and how they can best meet your IT needs both today and in the future, as well as the benefits you can expect along the way. Finally, we discuss what to look for in the right hyperconverged provider, who will position your IT department for success.

Today’s idea-driven economy calls for a simpler, faster virtualization solution—one that can be managed by one IT generalist vs. numerous IT specialists. Enter HPE Hyper Converged 380, an advanced, virtualized system from Hewlett Packard Enterprise. Based on the HPE ProLiant DL380 Gen9 Server, this enterprise-grade VM vending machine enables you to quickly deploy VMs, simplify IT operations, and reduce overall costs like no other hyperconverged system available today.

Enterprises are looking to innovations like big data, cloud-based services and mobile apps to improve decision making and accelerate business results. But legacy IT implementations—independent compute, storage and networking platforms, veneered with a hypervisor— often can’t deliver on the increased agility, scalability and price performance demands of this new era of IT.

Hyperconvered infrastructure -- the meddling together of servers and storage into a single appliance with streamlined management -- is a technology growing in popularity even as people struggle to figure out exactly what it can do, what it can't do, and just how it impacts the IT organization.

The Cloud, once a radical idea in IT, is now mainstream. Whether it’s email, backup or file sharing, most consumers probably use a cloud service or two. Similarly, most IT professionals are familiar with cloud service providers such as Amazon, Google and Microsoft Azure, and many companies have moved at least some of their information technology processes into the cloud. In fact, the cloud has become so popular it’s easy to assume that running IT applications on-premises is not cost competitive with a cloud based service. In this report Evaluator Group will test the validity of that assumption with a TCO (Total Cost of Ownership) model analyzing a hyperconverged appliance solution from HPE and a comparable cloud service from Amazon Web Services (AWS).

This IDC white paper reviews important market trends that have driven a dramatic increase of real world hyperconverged infrastructure deployments. This paper also provides results of in depth interviews and a global IDC survey of SimpliVity customers, many of whom have experienced considerable operational efficiency gains resulting from the use of SimpliVity hyperconverged infrastructure.

In recent years, it seems like technology is changing faster than it used to in decades past. As employees devour newer technologies such as smartphones, tablets, wearables, and other devices, and as they become more comfortable with solutions such as Dropbox and Skype, their demands on enterprise IT intensify. Plus, management and other decision makers are also increasing their demands on enterprise IT to provide more infrastructure with less cost and time. Unfortunately, enterprise IT organizations often don’t see much, if any, associated increases in funding to accomodate these demands.

Hyperconverged infrastructure is radically shaking up the IT landscape, creating huge operational and economic benefits. Tier 1 applications such as Exchange, SQL Server, Oracle and others are among the many beneficiaries of this new generation of infrastructure. However, there are many vendors jumping on the market bandwagon, and not all systems that are marketed as hyperconverged really fit the criteria. IT organizations need to do their homework to ensure they are selecting true hyperconverged solutions.

Imagine the benefits that a VDI environment could realize during a boot storm. All the VMs are based on the same template, and therefore they all have the same set of files during initial boot. Normally, 100 VMs all booting at the same time would require a significant number of HDDs, but with this hyperconverged infrastructure platform, the first VM to boot reads the block off the HDD, which promotes that block into cache. Now the next 99 VMs can all access that same block from cache. That’s a 100:1 IOPS reduction on the IOPS-bound disks.

Organizations increasingly require IT infrastructures that support the speed at which their businesses must operate through simplicity, efficiencies, agility, and strong performance. Hyperconverged infrastructure solutions, which enable organizations to minimize or nearly eliminate inefficiencies and complexity associated with maintaining storage and compute silos, have emerged as a strong potential solution for such organizations. IDC’s research demonstrates that organizations running workloads on Nutanix solutions such as Dell XC are benefiting are benefiting from cost and staff efficiencies, the ability to scale their infrastructure incrementally, very high resiliency, and strong application performance. This is helping interviewed Nutanix solutions customers better meet business challenges and has led many of them to establish plans for expanding their hyperconverged workload environment with Nutanix solutions.

Because many SQL Server implementations are running on virtual machines already, the use of a hyperconverged appliance is a logical choice. The Dell EMC XC Series with Nutanix software delivers high performance and low Opex for both OLTP and analytical database applications. For those moving from SQL Server 2005 to SQL Server 2016, this hyperconverged solution provides particularly significant benefits.

IDC interviewed organizations that have deployed Dell EMC VxRail and VxRack hyperconverged solutions powered by Intel® Xeon® Platinum processor to support their expanding IT and business operations. Study participants reported that Dell EMC HCI solutions serve as a foundation for innovation across their distributed organizations by providing a cost-effective, agile, and high-performing IT infrastructure foundation. The result is that these organizations are realizing a 619% five-year return on their investment in Dell EMC HCI solutions, which IDC puts at a value of $150,776 per 100 users per year, resulting in a six-month payback period.

Special Report

In this webinar Black Duck Software (www.blackducksoftware.com), together with representatives of SAP, will review the benefits open source offers to development organizations, the management challenges it presents, and approaches for addressing those challenges.

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